


What We Tell Mummy

by andthebluestblue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Overdose, Rehab
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-13
Updated: 2012-11-13
Packaged: 2017-11-18 13:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/561766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andthebluestblue/pseuds/andthebluestblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft knows how Sherlock forms relationships.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What We Tell Mummy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roane/gifts).



> Prompt: Sherlock and John have been together for several years. One of them is worried that their sex life is getting dull and routine. Is it? What do they do about it?

The first time Sherlock sees John he is powerfully, overwhelmingly fascinated. The room goes dim around him and the scent of formaldehyde retreats; he is overwhelmed by the rush of it, even across the room, the smelltastesoundsight of John’s history and habits and humanity, laid out in front of him, neat and fascinating as the corpse on the table. His fingers and scalp itch with the urge to get closer, pull off John’s clothes item by item, catalogue and cross-reference every piece of creased flesh and darn-scarred cloth.

But Sherlock does not. He has more control, now, than he used to; can push down the urge to know and pull on the sociable mask.  Thank god for simple, straightforward Molly, who might as well not bother getting dressed in the morning she’s so transparent, for her numbing repetition and naivete that let him pull back enough to offer John the flatshare he wants, and leave before his knees give out.

 _This is nothing new_ , he tells himself in the hallway, leaning against the wall and breathing deeply (formaldehyde again, Stamford’s cologne, the waxy scent of Molly’s lipstick and hair product, a shining dry smell that (gleams shines croons pours—liquid word) fascination). Sherlock knows himself—Sherlock knows everything of interest—and this is a familiar pattern; things have been slow at the station. It’s only to be expected, that his mind would find outlet elsewhere. It’s happened before, of course; the sudden blinding onset of fixation, the keening hunger to know someone inside and out that fills his chest and stomach, so tight he can barely breathe, can’t eat or sleep, barely even smoke.

The first time was in fourth form: Ryan Edinn, a classmate who kicked Sherlock in the shins the third time he caught Sherlock trying to count the freckles on the nape of his neck and then told his friends. They waited after school and beat him bloody. Sherlock learned things from that—not only to be more discreet, but that Ryan had an alcoholic uncle, that the brother between five and seven years his elder was a homosexual, that Ryan played football but preferred hockey. He repeated these things, breathless with excitement and not pain, while Mycroft set his good trousers to soak and sponged dirt off Sherlock’s knees.

“Perhaps,” Mycroft said, delicately, “You might simply tell Mummy that you called him a name.”

It lasted four months and Sherlock stepped into class one day and realized that Ryan was completely uninteresting. He no longer felt the need to catalogue scars or juice preferences or anything at all—whatever information he did not currently have was not worth the trouble of gathering, and Sherlock had never thought that before, that there might be data not worth the trouble.

In college there was Victor Trevor. He had curls that were not quite dark and not quite blonde, light stubble that never quite went away, and absolutely no sense of subtlety. The first time he caught Sherlock watching him in the dining hall he looked behind him, then at Sherlock, and smiled (Cold meat and mashed potatoes, no participation in sports, would like to work out more but doesn’t have time, father dead, mother involved in academia but at a higher level); the second time he winked (cup of coffee and a biscuit; showers frequently but erratically, polish-irish descent, one younger sister, keeps a dog at home who he misses); the third time, Sherlock returns to his room to find Victor waiting outside.

“Sherlock, is it?” and at Sherlock’s wary nod, grins. “I’ve been asking around. You’ve got quite the reputation, you know.”

“You’ve got—you’ve got a younger sister, a dog you see less often than you like; was the broken bone in your right ankle why you stopped playing football, or was it the falling-out? When you get dressed do you put your shoes on before or after your sweater—“

Victor’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “You’ve been asking around as well, I see.”

Sherlock opens his mouth to say, no, of course not, subjective data is compromised data and I am the only reliable—but Victor flashes him a smile, and then lowers his eyelashes, glances at the door, simple and calculated and obvious.

“You going to let me in, then?”

Victor is much, much easier to learn than Ryan was. He makes only token objections to Sherlock’s mapping of his skin, answers almost all his questions (“Really, Sherlock, isn’t it a bit early for that? Very well—left hand, if you must know”) despite a rather irritating tendency to want answers from Sherlock as well (“Well, what did you play in primary, then? Come on, everyone played _something_ ”); Sherlock doesn’t particularly understand the fixation Victor seems to have on certain acts (Sherlock’s mouth on his cock, ages after Sherlock has learned the taste)—of course he knows it’s about sex, he’s not _stupid_ but it seems tiresome and pointless and he is not learning anything new.

All told it’s almost four years before Sherlock gets bored. He doesn’t see it as much of a problem—Victor got bored at least two years ago, he knows, judging by the lipstick and the state of his trouser knees. So he is completely and utterly unprepared for Victor’s near-hysterical response to the news that Sherlock no longer particularly requires his presence. They have a screaming row that ends with Victor calling Sherlock a “cold cock-sucking void of humanity” and Sherlock nobly refrains from pointing out the flaws in the insult.

Really, there was no accounting for some people. Victor had seemed hurt, even confused, before things devolved—surely he had seen this coming. No one was infinite, and even if Sherlock had not so abruptly lost interest, eventually he would have learned all there was to know. It was to be expected—though Victor’s face rather haunts Sherlock. There had been none of this fall-out with Ryan, and Sherlock reluctantly decides that the problematic factor must be sex—he doesn’t mind forgoing it, but it had provided a flawless pretext for examination of skin and motor response.

When Mycroft makes his usual tactful inquiries about how many to expect for Christmas dinner, Sherlock coldly informs him that he will be attending alone. Mycroft offers apologies, and Sherlock cuts him off—“Don’t bother. I got bored.”

Mycroft pauses, the phone echoing empty. “Perhaps,” he says, voice careful, “you might simply tell Mummy that you wanted two different things out of life.”

The next time he is more careful. He meets Abby in an anatomy class he snuck into for the express purpose of access to a cadaver; she is the only one who looks bored rather than falsely eager or nauseated as the instructor runs them down the list of do’s and don’t’s for their corpses. Sherlock crosses his fingers, and they are assigned to the same body.

She gives him exactly the same bored, unimpressed look over the body, while their group mates laugh nervously and tell almost-jokes. After two weeks she waits for him outside the morgue and holds out her hand.

“Abby.” It is not quite an offer.

“Sherlock,” he responds, crushing down the internal chant of _I know your name, your shoe size, the lump in your left breast you’re concerned about but that is only a hormonal fluctuation, the girlfriend you broke up with because you hated her iguana, I know, I know, for the love of god give me some new information._

It works. They meet regularly for coffee after class, partially to discuss topics that the instructor failed to adequately address and partially to adequately address the failings of their classmates. She takes her coffee with two creams and a sugar and then does not drink it; her hands shake anyway. She has smoker’s fingers still but says she quit “a year ago—mostly, anyway.” Both parents deceased, small sum left to her, the rest to a brother with whom she has an amicable but distant relationship. Left a good job as the head of a high-class restaurant to be a doctor because, she said, the money was better, and it couldn’t be any more stressful.

Eventually she invites him back to her place for a drink; he evaluates her pupils and heart rate carefully (won’t make same mistakes, not again) and agrees. Her flat is a windfall of information that he never had a glimpse of—spent some time in Asia, perfume allergy, wanted to join the army growing up but couldn’t reconcile it politically. He comes over a few times a week for a month before he decodes a few last things, and she offers him a hit. He pauses, eying the needle she’s holding, and she rolls her eyes “I’ll run a match over it, Nancy, it’ll be fine.” He sneers at her but doesn’t hesitate any more.

Experience is knowledge, after all, and he has never done this before. And she has. If nothing else it’s vital because he is a fool for not recognizing the signs before now—sleeves over track marks, shaking hands, tired eyes—a dozen tiny obvious clues that he should have seen and put together months ago. Sloppy.

Abby and cocaine become intertwined for Sherlock, and he can’t think of one without wondering about the other. He spends six years high out his mind and learning every inch of Abby’s apartment—poor substitution for her body. He stops showing up to class and she fails out of med school, and he moves in to help with the rent. She does more and more cocaine, saying she’s going numb, and he starts picking pockets to pay for it. He gets caught a few times, beat up twice and brought into the cops once—the arresting officer gives him a cursory glance, and the track marks a tired look, and has him thrown in a cell for the night. Sherlock snarls at him through the bars—Abby is waiting for him at home, deal is scheduled for the next day, he doesn’t have time for this—and the officer says, “Calm down. You’ll be out tomorrow.”

“She’s not pregnant and hasn’t told you yet. Don’t bother with the wedding.”

The officer pauses, flushed ugly red, and hurries out. Sherlock uses his phone call on Mycroft, hating him, hating the police, and Mycroft makes some more calls. Sherlock walks out forty minutes later, the officer stony-faced and silent at his back.

He gets back to the apartment too late. Abby doesn’t have a pulse but he calls 999 anyway, rides in the ambulance with her body. Overdose, the doctors say, and he doesn’t bother fighting off the urge to sneer at them and roll his eyes. _Tell me something I don’t know_. One of them gives him a pamphlet on addiction recovery, and he crumples it up and drops it in the bin on his way out.

He’s never lost a subject before he was done with them, never had to cut things off so suddenly. It’s awful. Everything goes blank and itching and horrible, settling harsh against his bones with all the things he will never know. He doesn’t miss her or grieve for her—he craves her, needs her, more than he needs the cocaine. But they’re still linked enough for him that it scratches the itch, a little.

He increases his dosage; then again, trying to dig into who she was at the end; wakes up in a police cell a few more times. After six months he realizes that he can no longer remember the details he was trying to learn about her; he doubles his dose. After seven he notices that he is having trouble remembering even what he already knew. He calls Mycroft, who responds with a list of recommended clinics swiftly enough that Sherlock knows he has it waiting by the phone. Sherlock agrees, still ungrateful and angry, and Mycroft’s car is at his door within the hour.

It is a long ride—the clinic is in the country. Near the end, when they are standing in the lobby and waiting for the paperwork, Mycroft turns to Sherlock. He knows what’s coming.

“Perhaps,” Mycroft says, still not meeting his eyes, “you might simply tell Mummy that it’s pneumonia.”

Sherlock gets through rehab, leaves, relapses within a month. He goes back, breaks out after two weeks for a hit, goes back without anyone noticing; he sits through addiction meetings high for almost a week before they realize and kick him out. By the time he’s made it into the sixth clinic, Mycroft has stopped offering suggestions—he’s lost weight, and there are new lines at the corners of his eyes. Sherlock knows that he is running out of options.

He is three weeks into the eighth round of treatment when the attendant tells him he has a call. He answers the phone, expecting Mycroft, but is surprised to recognize the voice of his first arresting officer—he’d seen him several times since then, he is relatively certain, though things are blurred and he couldn’t depend on it (and doesn’t that _burn_ ).

“Sherlock Homes?”

“Speaking.”

“We need you down at the station. Your b—we want you in to look at a murder.”

It is utterly inexplicable, and Sherlock has no interest in revisiting past haunts, letting them watch him with their stupid patient judgmental eyes. But it can’t be any worse than group therapy.

****

It’s a simple murder; they should have been able to solve it themselves. He knows at a glance that the man they’ve arrested is innocent, and explains exactly why. The officer—Lestrade, older than Sherlock remembers, more grey—looks dubious but interested, the doubt decreasing as Sherlock continues. He finishes, breathless, with the list of the _actual_ murderer’s visual characteristics, and Lestrade is almost nodding with him.

“D’you have a minute? I’ve got some other cases I’d like you to take a look at.”

Sherlock spends the rest of his night with case files, shoddy descriptions and incomplete photographs of crime scenes, digging out hints and truths and a solution every time. Some of them have obviously already been solved and are only included at a test, and he sneers at Lestrade before finishing them. He is right every time, he knows, though Lestrade only grunts, his eyes glittering. Sherlock doesn’t mind—his brain is writhing in his skull, he feels flushed and furiously present, and he doesn’t think about Abby’s fingernails or cocaine once the entire day.

Fascination with his work, Sherlock learns, is different. In some ways it’s easier—a wider base to learn from, less dread of running out of data, a more socially acceptable preoccupation. But there are still complicating factors—there’s no limit of information but there is, at times,  a limit of crime—a limit of what Lestrade will allow him, anyway—and the lines of social acceptability are still rather limited when the work involves corpses. Still, access to a morgue for research is a lot easier now that he can claim police business (easier still with Lestrade’s lifted badge, and easiest of all when the small brown-haired infatuated morgue attendant is working; Sherlock watches her pulse speed and her pupils dilate and thinks _Molly Hooper, the things I could teach you about obsession and carefully does not_ ). ** **  
****

Lestrade never mentions Mycroft but Sherlock knows, of course, and at Christmas he lets Mycroft raise a glass and say “To Sherlock’s new work in delinquency correction.” Sherlock does not say anything, and Mummy smiles, and for a moment Sherlock almost wants to forgive Mycroft (before the pudding comes out and Mycroft says, smug as balls, “None for me, thank you”).

It goes on for five years, and every time Sherlock starts to lose interest a criminal does something phenomenally gloriously clever (or wonderfully stupid) and the chase begins again, and he is infatuated again. There are worse nights and he fights with every member of Lestrade’s team whenever possible (Sally Donovan, eventually, is the only one left who will fight back, and he starts to think of her as a sort of friend, albeit one who hates him).

And then one spring afternoon, John Watson walks into his lab, and everything goes flat around him.

****

It is different now; Sherlock still loves the crime, John doesn’t cancel that out. He has space for both, though the fullness makes him breathless and sometimes he wonders how he sleeps at all. It helps that John does not know, of course—or Sherlock doesn’t think he does, anyway. As simple as most people are to read, a shocking number of them seem to be wildly unaware of the simplest data—particularly, Sherlock finds, when it comes to sexual attraction. John, he knows, would be prepared to swear in court that he was completely heterosexual, despite a recurrent infatuation with a member of his unit in Afghanistan and a childhood preoccupation with certain football players. Despite the size of his pupils when he looks at Sherlock, the pitch of his voice when Sherlock wanders out of his room in the mornings wrapped in a sheet and nothing else.

That, if nothing else, is fascinating—and useful; even without John’s draw Sherlock might find it worthwhile to observe him. But with the draw—well. It’s a heady combination, powerful and consuming, and that with John’s shared interest in his work is enough to send Sherlock reeling sometimes. But he is careful; he reveals none of this to John, and John seems to take only the smallest steps toward the conclusion on his own—it is seventeen months before he stops going out on the same pointless round of first-second-third date with women. A few months later, after ensuring the pattern shift is consistent, Sherlock suggests that they convert one of the available bedrooms into a lab—which would, he hints, keep his experiments out of the kitchen. John raises his eyebrows and says “planning to kip on the couch, then?”

“I rather thought I would share with you.”

Sherlock watches him carefully, and, yes—flushed cheeks, heart rate immediately elevated, automatic movement of hands to his hips and the quick once-over of Sherlock’s body—oh, it is sweet, _gorgeous_ —all done in an instant and without John ever noticing.

“You’re…you’re completely mad,” John says, still pink, but does not say no. He looks resigned the first few nights, then complacent, and in three months Sherlock wakes up to John pressed close to his back. He is warm, almost searing, and Sherlock spends a long moment frozen, afraid to move in case it wakes him, trying to reconcile the knowledge that the best idea is to slip out of bed and leave John there with the howling inner part of him that wants him to turn over, press himself to John, run his mouth over every inch of his skin and lick into his mouth, taste heat and slick teeth and fill his hands and his nose and—no. Victor. ** **  
****

This cannot end; Sherlock will not let John come to hate him. That is not an option.

John makes a small grunting noise when Sherlock rises, and Sherlock fiercely refrains from memorizing the skin showing where his pajama top rides up. It would only make things more difficult, he tells himself, and uses up all the hot water in revenge.

He wanders into the kitchen, afterwards, wanting a cup of tea, not quite wrapped in a towel, hair still wet. John is already there and there is a long moment where his eyes go dark and his mouth opens slightly and Sherlock stumbles back a step under the deafening onslaught of his gaze. But it passes—most of it—and John looks away.

“Sherlock, if you need money for clothes, you could just ask. There’s really no need to parade around in this kind of get up.”

Sherlock says something sneering in return, steals John’s mug of tea and takes it back to the bedroom to get dressed.

Neither of them are satisfied, exactly—there  is never quite enough of John, and Sherlock knows down to his bones that John never has quite enough of him, either—knows it in the way John’s hands slide on his arms, the typical way his eyes linger, the strain of his lips when Sherlock brushes them with his own. Never a kiss, really—that is too close, and Sherlock is not sure John would ever be resigned to it. Not a kiss. Not quite an offer.

Neither of them are satisfied but both of them are there, present and grounded, and Sherlock is willing to have this forever—John’s gaze wet on his back, his neck, the warmth of an occupied flat.

But Sherlock very rarely gets what he wants.

****

He thinks, at first, that John has met someone else. Not for long, of course; Sherlock is having a positive effect on John’s mental powers but even he can only do so much. John would be tediously obvious if that were the situation.

It’s not an unreasonable assumption, though—John’s movements have become more relaxed, and there’s none of the frantic hunger in his gaze. Sherlock barely ever looks up and catches John’s eyes on him anymore.

It’s a relief, at first. He even thinks that John might have finally come to regard their relationship the way that Sherlock does; a mutually beneficial arrangement in which each party has his life improved by contact with the other, without undue burden on himself. After a day or two, though, it begins to gnaw at him—John is not as rational as Sherlock. If he has stopped the unspoken pressure of his almost-casual touching and careful restraint, there is a reason.

Some illness, perhaps, is Sherlock’s  next thought; but he monitors John for temperature increase or other symptoms and there are none. His sleep and eating habits are consistent; not the result of a mental illness, then. That rules out the next possibility of low libido as a side effect of an SSRI antidepressant or similar medication.

No known physiological or psychological cause, then. He watches John carefully, and it’s as though—as though John has given up. He seems less at peace and more resigned; tired rather than tranquil. Listless. He still presses Sherlock’s hip, briefly, when Sherlock comes to bed, but holds himself neither self-consciously distant nor pressed daringly close. He goes quiet and pleased when Sherlock brushes lips across the top of his head, still, but there is no focus there, like there used to be, urgent and quivering like a dog on a leash.

****

John is done with Sherlock, like Sherlock was done with Ryan and then with Victor, and never quite with Abby. He realizes it when John is at work, and there is a long moment of fury—how _dare_ he—and Victor’s reaction makes sense, now.

But remembering Victor means remembering the bemused pity—the thin sheen of disgust—he felt at Victor’s histrionics. Sherlock will not make himself pitiable. He is a rational person above all, and he will handle this rationally.

He can be done with John. It is doable, he knows it is, and he moves his things into the crowded lab space that night. John does not comment.

****

John is done with Sherlock, and Sherlock is done with John. The next time Mycroft sends a car, Sherlock gets into it alone, and sits across from Mycroft. There is a pause, and then Mycroft speaks.

“Perhaps,” he says, and Sherlock lets the sound of it wash over him, “We might simply tell Mummy you’ve decided to focus on your career.”

 


End file.
